Description

The Open-Xchange Mobile Web Interface provides you access to your data from the Open-Xchange Server 6 via your smartphone. The Open-Xchange Mobile Web Interface offers online and offline access to appointments, contacts and mails on the road using your smartphone's browser. Optimized for low bandwiths the Open-Xchange Mobile Web Interface offers instant and fast over the air access to your data, which are at the same time safely stored on Open-Xchange Server. The following modules are supported:

Themeability, branding and i18n

Supported devices

The Open-Xchange Mobile Web Interface is designed to run on modern devices running Android or iOS. It can also used with modern desktop browsers.

Device Support

Apple iOS

iOS 3 - 5.1

Android

yes, Android 2.2 - 4.0

Official Supported by OX: Google Nexus One (Android 2.3.3), Samsung Galaxy Nexus (Android 4.0.3). The web interface is optimized for a display size of 320 x 480 pixels. Smaller resolutions may result displaying issues of some UI elements

Technical overview

Based on HTML5, CSS, Javascript (jQuery Mobile)

Optimized for Webkit browsers like Mobile Safari and Chrome. Will also work with restrictions on Firefox and Opera Mobile

Complete offline capability

Updates with version 1.1.0 rev 8

True fixed toolbars:

Version 1.1.0 rev 6 of the Mobile Web Interface used dynamic recalcualtion to re-position footer and header bars on the fly after scrolling the document. The new version of jQuery Mobile (1.1) now uses CSS based positioning which is truly native on supported platforms.

Some platforms like iOS 4 will now fall back to static positioning where the toolbars simply scroll with the page.

Platforms which support fixed toolbars:

iOS5 – iPhone and iPad

Android 2.2 and 2.3

Android 3.x tablets (Honeycomb)

Android 4.x (ICS)

Chrome for Android (beta)

BB Playbook 1-2

All modern desktop browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, etc.)

Offline Mode details

The Open-Xchange Mobile Web Interface uses HTML5 to provide an offline mode for the user. To do this, there are two different kinds of storage mechanisms.

The whole web interface uses caching by incorporating the "HTML5 application cache". This will be done on the first visit/start of the web interface. After this initial download, all graphics, language files, js-files and everything else which is needed to run the web interface is stored locally on your phone in a storage managed by the browser.

The data from the OX server will be stored using the HTML5 storage mechanism which will be supportet by the users device. These can be a HTML5 local storage, session storage or an SQLite database. For the user there's no difference between these different storage modes.

Requirements

Open-Xchange Server >= v.6.20 rev 21

Installation on Open-Xchange v6.22.x

Debian GNU/Linux 6.0

Add the following entry to /etc/apt/sources.list if not already present:

Upgrading from previous versions

If you have the previous version of the Mobile Web Interface installed (1.0), you can not upgrade to version 1.1 or later directly. Due to a package rename you have to remove the old packages before installing the new ones. The packages for version 1.0 are prefixed with "open-xchange-gui-mobile-v2", the new ones are prefixed with "open-xchange-mobile*".

RedHat Enterprise Linux

Please note, the package open-xchange-gui-mobile-v2 is located on your ox backend system, open-xchange-gui-mobile-v2-gui and open-xchange-gui-mobile-v2-theme-default are installed on your webserver machine. If both systems are the same you have to remove all packes on the same system.

After removing the old packages proceed with the installation of the new version 1.1 or later

Configuration

Installation on the Apache 2 webserver:

Important note for upgraders:
In previous versions (lower 1.1) a server address had to be entered in the cache.manifest file to grant access to the OX6 backend. This not needed anymore. The new version of the mobile web grants per default access to all uncached ressources. Don't edit the cache.manifest manually.

You need to add a new mimetype to your webserver configuration to make sure the caching (offline mode) works.

On Apache servers you can add the mimetype either global or via ".htaccess" file.

For global configuration edit the file mime.conf under /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/

Add the line "AddType text/cache-manifest .manifest" to the file, save and restart apache

For configuration via .htaccess file just add a .htaccess file to the install directory. This should include the line "AddType text/cache-manifest .manifest'". Note: Either the global configuration or the .htaccess file should be used. (.htaccess files will only work if your Apache settings contain AllowOverride. For further information on mime types, please refer to your webservers user manual)

To direct to the correct host another site in apache is needed. Create a file named "mobile" in /etc/apache2/sites-available (and enable it by linking to it from sites-enabled, of course):

For more details and README see the systems documentation directory (/usr/share/doc).

Running the Open-Xchange Mobile Web Interface on your smartphone

After installation of the web interface on your webserver, a client can easily access the web interface via his phone's browser. We recommend to add a new subdomain to your web address to make access for clients easy. A short subdomain like https://m.example.com which points to your installation will save users from entering a long URL on their devices.

Like mentioned before, the Open-Xchange Mobile Web Interface is a pure web application. Due to this fact there is no installation or download needed to use this web interface on a smartphone. Just add a bookmark in your browser to access the web interface again later.

Especially on iOS devices there's a seamless integration within the native apps installed via the AppStore®. Just add a new bookmark to the Open-Xchange Mobile Web Interface and choose "Add to homescreen". After this, the Open-Xchange Mobile Web Interface will place a new app icon on the homescreen.

Using the offline mode

During the first run, the web interface is stored localy on your smartphone. These caching mechanism makes a later access to the web interface very fast and gives you the possibility to run the web interface even if there's no internet connection available.

The Open-Xchange Mobile Web Interface detects on startup whether there's an internet connection available or not. If not, the web interface will start in offline mode. In this case most features which need a internet connection are disabled. In offline mode you can access all your subscribed contacts and all of your appointments. Also all your mail headlines are available. Furthermore each email which was opened earlier is available in offline mode.

Known Issues

Client

The Open-Xchange Mobile Web Interface uses a custom, built-in navigation and history. To navigate back you will have to use the "back" buttons located on the top-left of the page. Using the browser's back button will sometimes not bring you back to the right page.

If you clean the browser cache on your device or reset it to defaults, all local stored data will be flushed.

Server

The Open-Xchange backend uses a security mechanism called "IP check". This feature is enabled by default for a OX Server. This feature will have an impact on the usage of the Open-Xchange Mobile Web Interface, especially the option "Stay logged in". This feature will only work if your IP address does not change between the restarts of the web interface. If you are changing your network connection often when you travel around (different GSM spots, WIFI connections), your phone will get new IP addresses to access the internet. This will cause the OX backend to refuse your auto-login attempt (which is performed on every start of the web interface) because your IP address has changed. To avoid this you can either turn off the IP check feature on the OX backend or add the Open-Xchange Mobile Web Interface to the client whitelist table for IP-check. This will disable the IP check just for the web interface.

Theming

The Open-Xchange Mobile Web Interface is themed via CSS and HTML. To create your own theme you will have to create new graphics and edit the css file in the theme path. To do so follow the steps below:

Locate the theme path under "path to your webroot/mobile/theme"

To create your own theme make a copy of this folder and backup the original one

The folder contains a css file which holds all editable values for the web interface. To change values edit the original file or create a new one which overwrites some of the old styles. Use Firebug or the Chrome/Safari developer tools to locate css classes and styles you want to edit.

The folders "img" holds all graphics which are used in the web interface.

Always remember: Your are designing for mobile. This means: Keep fonts clear and easy to read. Keep file sizes small due to small bandwiths. Keep buttons big enought the user can touch them easily.